What is a good bounce rate?

A bounce rate, for those not familiar with the term, is the percentage of users who come to your site and then leave without going to another page. Too many SEOs, and other experts, write articles and give seminars where they say such things as “any bounce rate under 50%” is good,” or that a “30-40% bounce rate is good” and a 50% bounce rate means that you have to work on x, y or z in order to bring your site to the optimal bounce rate percentage.

I don’t think any such generalization can be made. You may have a page for upcoming events and the user went straight there to make certain he had the date and location correct. People may be looking for your phone number, find it on the first shot, and then bounce off. It does not mean that there is anything wrong with your keywords, your site organization, or the way you are presenting information on a page. It means the user found what they were looking for.

Frequent visitors to your site are probably not going to crawl through your site each and every time they come there. They are coming for specific reasons. Often times that will mean that they will get what their looking for on the first page.

Example: you’re looking to find out if your team won or lost last night. You go to nba.com and there is the score on the top of the page. You may not want to go any further. You found your information and you left. The same thing holds true on your website. You could lower the bounce rate by forcing the user to click through a series of pages to find the data they’re looking for (such as hiding your company address or phone number) but that would be counter-productive.

What does this mean? It means that you cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to bounce rates. If a frequent user comes to your blog he may not click through your site but still be a very satisfied user. Analyzing your bounce rate will have to include thinking about the user – if the user found what he was looking for and bounced off. Great. Don’t dwell on the fact that he didn’t stay longer. The more the user incorporates you into his routine the less he is going to crawl through your site.

People are only spending 0 seconds on my site

I'm often asked by clients who look through their Log Stats, such as Statcounter and Google Analytics, why people are "only spending 0 seconds" on their site. "How is it possible for so many people to spend less than a second on the site?" they ask.

"0 seconds" does not indicate that your visitor came to your site by mistake or spent only a fraction of a second there. It indicates that the visitor looked at only that one page. The analytics program can only measure time spent on your site if the visitor clicks on another page on your site.

While you need at least 2 points in time -- 2 pageloads -- to compute a visit length even that may not be completely accurate. AOL users, for example, will generate 0 second visits because their IP changes constantly.

Does Google Analytics Slow Down Your Site?

I’ve heard complaints that Google Analytics slows down site rendering. I don’t see that being possible. A small bit of code calls a javascript file (ga.js) from Google’s servers; this file collects data and drops a cookie in the user’s machine. Since this file is in cache it doesn’t affect bandwidth. The file also calls a 1x1 pixel graphic (_utm.gif) and attaches the data in a query string – at 35 bits the bandwidth hit is irrelevant; nor should creating the query string have any affect.

And yet, while I haven't experienced it, others have complained about Google Analytics slowing their site. They would add GA and response time slowed. They removed GA and response time returned to normal. All I can say is -- place your GA call at the bottom of your page. I would also take a look at your site in general. GA could be the proverbial last straw: check your database calls, see if there is inefficient coding, are the graphics optimized, are you using tables for layout.